#Alleman

Fifty years after Alleman, theater director Bert Hana leads us through the streets of the Netherlands, digitally captured through Google Street View.

Fifty years after the release of documentary master Bert Haanstra’s Alleman (still the best-attended Dutch documentary of all time), theater director and actor Bert Hana presents his homage to the iconic film, a live documentary that travels through the streets of the Netherlands by way of their digital images. Over the past few years, Hana created an immense archive of images of the Netherlands through Google Street View. As Haanstra’s documentary did in 1963, these images depict the ordinary Dutchman and characteristic scenes of daily life in our country. We watch as women mow their lawns, a family has a picnic, and soccer moms bicker with one another. We cross the barren plains of Zeeland and the crowded communal gardens in Amsterdam, encounter rowdy teenagers, and behold Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring”. Passing through the various scenes, a fascinating picture of our flat little country emerges. Combining the theater’s direct address with cinema’s visual power and accompanied by a live soundtrack, #Alleman asks what has changed over the past 50 years. Have we exchanged prudishness for worries about privacy? Has the abundance of information made us richer?

DOCLAB

IDFA DocLab is the New Media program of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA). Since 2007, the program showcases new forms of documentary storytelling and interactive media art, both online and offline. During the IDFA Festival in November, DocLab presents a competition program for Digital Documentary Storytelling, live cinema events, interactive installations, workshops and industry panels. The program is open to all media that can be used to tell a documentary story.more